Review: War in the North harkens to weekends lost to pizza and soda

War in the North Review: Lord of the Rings harkens to weekends lost to pizza and soda

Lord of the Rings: War in the North fulfills the promise of the Lord of Rings beat-em-ups that came out with the movies. Where those hack-and-slash reenactments screamed for multiplayer, now, almost a decade later, we finally get a real multiplayer action game set in Tolkien’s world.

Yet while the Lord of the Rings audience* of then-high schoolers and college students may have had free weekends to spend guzzling soda and pizza with buddies over a controller in 2001, they may not be as inclined to give up their free time to giant talking eagles in 2011.

War in the North is set parallel to the events of The Lord of the Rings movies, and follows a set of heroes created by developer Snowblind studios specifically for the game.

The whole game is based off of an off-handed mention by Gandalf in Return of the King that everything they had been fighting for would have been moot had “the war in the north” not gone so well. And if that last sentence seemed confusing to you, now is probably the time to check out.

War in the North requires at least a passing knowledge of The Lord of the Rings franchise, and is better if you’re the kind of fan who watched the movies a few times and has read The Hobbit to boot.

The three heroes created for the game are Eradan, a human ranger (like Aragorn); Andriel, an elf from Rivendell (like Arwen); and Farin, a dwarf from the Lonely Mountain (like Gimli). To say that these three are merely player cyphers would perhaps be generous to the amount of characterization they get through the course of the game. They are mostly just the arch-typical versions of an elf, dwarf and ranger.

This lack of character isn’t too much to the game’s detriment, as most of your time is spent in breezy dungeon crawling levels that take the best elements from Final Fight and the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games (the developer was behind the first Dark Alliance in 2001).

While a certain amount of timing is required in combat, for the most part, battles are won and lost based on how well you use the skills in your arsenal tactically, and less on how well you string together a combo. This means that early on, when you haven’t learned many skills, the game can seem exceedingly simple. However, as the quest stretches on you’ll find yourself juggling between a series of options in each battle.

And stretch on the game does. It’s a surprisingly long game, spanning at least 15 hours for just the main quest, and closer to 20 or 25 if you really spend your time on side quests or challenge yourself to the co-operative horde-style levels.

Which isn’t to say those levels are the only place you’ll find co-op in War in the North: the campaign is designed around it. The entire game can be played with three co-operative human players (the computer fills in if you have less than three) and your levels and progress are constant regardless of who’s game you’re playing in.

War in the North offers a robust suite of ways to connect with your friends, from split screen (up to two people on one Xbox), via the Internet (Xbox Live/PSN/Steam), via system link or any combination between those. You can even play by yourself and leave your party open to a friend or stranger joining in at any time. It’s the addition of system link play (play over a local-area network) that implies that Snowblind really knew their audience would be college-age players in dorms, where large numbers of students hook their computers and consoles together on a shared network. Generally, the multiplayer experience is seemless and easy.

And the gameplay is ideal for this kind of slothful couch camaraderie, where long afternoons can be frittered away in the company of friends while smiting orcs.

Which isn’t to say the game is unplayable by a single player. In fact, for the most part, the game is a little bit easier for one person alone because the friendly AI is set to pretty much drop everything and help you out when you get knocked to the ground (human players, no matter how helpful, are rarely so attentive).

There are a few exceptions; a handful of levels seem very clearly designed around at least two thinking brains, but generally a single player shouldn’t have too much hardship getting through the game.

That said, War in the North is less fun by oneself. The game doesn’t know a single gaming trope that it doesn’t embrace (WitN‘s fellowship gets locked in so many rooms after the door slams shut behind them that I lost count), and these can become wearing without the company of a fellow gamer. What saves the single-player experience are the relatively deep (or at least deep enough) RPG-elements that exist alongside the hack-and-slash gameplay. Each character has a set of skills that can be customized based on play style, and there’s a robust loot and equipment system in the game.

Less even are the story moments. While the general thrust of the action has a fairly breathless pace which takes you through several interesting environments not glimpsed in the movies, a large chunk of the dialogue is clunky. The game uses a strange beginner’s-level version of the BioWare conversation system at major story points; you’re allowed to pick what your character will say, but it has almost no impact on the flow of the conversation or the outcome of the scene, and slows down the gameplay in multiplayer situations.

Lastly, the game (as played on the Xbox 360) has a few minor, but noticeable, bugs. They mostly entail small glitches in triggering story events, and, in one case, the game locking me out of the second half of a boss fight until I quit and re-entered the game. Thankfully, War in the North has a forgiving and easy to understand checkpoint system so these bugs were never game breaking or as frustrating as they could have been.

Overall, War in the North leaves yearning for the days of yore, back before I was a full-fledged adult with adult friends who don’t have endless Saturdays to pour into making Middle-Earth safe.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North is out now for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the PC. The game is rated M for Mature for a level of graphic violence about on par with the PG-13 movies. This review was done using the Xbox 360 version with multiplayer tested over Xbox Live.

* (The reviewer is well aware that Lord of the Rings has a large and varied audience of all ages, genders and races. However, the audience for a beat-em-up style video game based on the 2001-2003 movie series is, in his opinion, more narrow.)

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